Land, Chiefs, Mining: South Africa's North West Province since 1840

By Andrew Manson and Bernard Mbenga

Land, Chiefs, Mining explores aspects of the experience of the Batswana in the thornveld and bushveld regions of the North-West Province, shedding light on defi ning issues, moments and individuals in this lesser known region of South Africa. Some of the focuses are: an important Tswana kgosi (chief ), Moiloa II of the Bahurutshe; responses to and participation in the South African War and its aftermath, 1899-1907; land acquisition; economic and political conditions in the reserves; resistance to Mangope’s Bophuthatswana; the impact of game parks and the Sun City resort; rural resistance and the liberation struggle; and African reaction to the platinum mining revolution. Written in a direct and accessible style, and illustrated with photographs and maps, the book provides an understanding, for a general reader ship, of the region and its recent history. At the same time it opens up avenues for further research. The authors, Andrew Manson and Bernard Mbenga, both based at North-West University, Mahikeng Campus, have, for some thirty years, been studying and writing on the region’s past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781868149926

Andrew Manson

Andrew Manson is Research Professor in the Faculty of Human and Social Sciences, North-West University

Book preview

Introduction

This book deals with aspects of the history of the black, predominantly Setswanaspeaking population of today’s North West Province of South Africa. It covers the period from approximately1840, with the beginning of settler and colonial domination, to the present. It is not a comprehensive account but, rather, a number of interrelated chapters on different topics which chart the various political and economic forces that have shaped the fortunes of communities and personalities in the province.

The North West Province is a recent geographical construct that arose out of the Constitution underpinning the new democratic dispensation in 1994. It comprises parts of the former western Transvaal, most of the former homeland of Bophuthatswana, and the northern reaches of the Cape Colony, later Cape Province (see Map 1). In one sense, the construct is not entirely artificial, for its inhabitants broadly comprise two culturally and politically homogeneous units – Setswana-speakers and Afrikaners – who have experienced close to 200 years of contact with one another. This is not to suggest that both societies were sealed off from outside influences. Both had extensive contact with their surrounding inhabitants and there was a constant infusion of other people into this region over a long period of time. Both societies interacted with British colonialism and bore the imprint of that association.

The history of the baTswana in South Africa has by no means been neglected. The early arrival of missionaries, traders and hunters from south of the Orange River, and the settlement of the Boers on the western highveld have ensured that many aspects of their societies were written down, providing a rich source of information for later scholars.

IMPORTANT PUBLISHED WORKS ON THE BATSWANA IN SOUTH AFRICA

Between the burgeoning of research and writing on African societies in South Africa beginning in the late 1960s, and its petering out some two decades later, the baTswana in the Republic – with the exception of Kevin Shillington’s history of the colonisation of the Southern baTswana – rather missed the boat as far as published works are concerned. Shillington’s work, however, principally covered the Southern Tswana living in the former colonies of Griqualand West and British Bechuanaland. As far as other Tswana chiefdoms are concerned, the baFokeng have been the focus of a recent study by the authors of this volume as well as Heinrich Baumann, and Fred Morton sheds light on events in the Pilanesberg district through several studies of the closely related baKgatla ba Kgafela in the Bechuanaland Protectorate.

Important aspects of twentieth-century Kgatla affairs are recounted in J Magala’s history of the baKgatla ba Kgafela. Nancy Jacobs has written an environmental history of the black Tswana residents of the Kuruman district (although it is a little removed geographically from the North West Province). This declining attention to African societies in the pre-colonial and colonial eras was partly a reflection of increasing concern for other scholarly movements such as postmodernism, social and urban history, feminist and gender studies and, in South Africa especially, liberation histories which, on the whole, treated rural affairs in an understated way in which African reserves were viewed ‘largely in terms of their functionality to the developing capitalist system’.¹ The other diversionary development was the rise of nationalism in Africa which focused on ‘the larger narrative of national self-fulfilment’.² In this vision of Africa’s past, colonialism was either regarded as dead and buried and best forgotten, or reformulated as neocolonialism and used as a justification for the failures of many modern African states. Recent times, however, have seen a shift in interest to the last two centuries in Africa, sparked by renewed interest in postcolonial and subaltern studies. Finally, recent interest in the impact of South Africa’s ‘bantustans’ has led to a revival of interest in the lives of those trapped ‘away in the locations’.³

Some of the more important books that have been published include Kevin Shillington’s The Colonisation of the Southern Tswana, 1870-1900 (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1985) which deals mainly with the baTlhaping and baTlharo merafe south of the Molopo River up to the turn of the nineteenth century. Part of this story has been reworked into a book on one of its leading figures, Luka Jantjie: Resistance Hero of the South African Frontier (London and Johannesburg: Aldridge and Wits University Press, 2011). Silas Modiri Molema wrote biographies of two prominent nineteenth century baRolong leaders, Montshiwa 1815-1896, BaRolong Chief and Patriot (Cape Town: Struik, 1966) and Chief Moroka: His Life and Times (Cape Town: Struik, 1950). The baFokeng received attention from the authors in ‘People of the Dew’: A History of the BaFokeng of Rustenburg-Phokeng Region of South Africa from Early Times to 2000 (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2010). Nancy Jacobs wrote a socioenvironmental history of the Kuruman district entitled Environment, Power, and Justice: A South African History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) that has implications for the wider thornveld districts of Mafikeng/Vryburg/Taung. For relations between the baKgatla in the Bechuanaland Protectorate and in the Pilanesberg see F Morton, When Rustling Became an Art: Pilane’s Kgatla and the Transvaal frontier, 1820-1902 (Cape Town: David Philip, 2009). An account of Kgatla affairs in the Transvaal is recounted in J Magala, History of the Bakgatla baga Kgafela (Crink City, 2009). Valuable, though in respects tainted, ethnographic information is available in P-L Breutz, A History of the Batswana and the Origins of Bophuthatswana, A Survey of the Tribes of the Batswana, S Ndebele, Qwaqwa and Botswana (Ramsgate: Breutz, 1989). M Legassick, The Politics of a South African Frontier, The Griqua, The Sotho-Tswana and the Missionaries, 1790-1840 (Basler Afrika Bibliografen, 2010), (based on his doctorate of 1969), is an invaluable source for the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century. Of interest on other baTswana societies are C Murray, Black Mountain, Land, Class, and Power in the Eastern Orange Free State,1808s to 1980s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992; the cultural anthropological studies of the Comaroffs on the Tshidi-BaRolong – J Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People (Chicago: Chicago University Press) and J Comaroff and J Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1997) – which shed light on the processes of cultural diffusion and assimilation between the baRolong and the evangelising nonconformist mission movement in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, closely bound up with the objectives of British colonialism.

NOTES

1W. Beinart and C. Bundy, Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa: Politics and Popular Movements in the Transkei and the Eastern Cape , 1890-1930 (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1987).

2P. Limb, N. Etherington and P. Midgley (eds), ‘Grappling with the Beast’: Indigenous Southern African Response to Colonialism, 1840-1930 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010). p.5.

3South African Historical Journal , vol.64, no 1, (2012). See especially the Introduction by William Beinart, ‘Beyond Homelands: Some Ideas about the History of Rural Areas in South Africa’, pp. 5-21.

Generally speaking, however, the prominent Tswana personalities are less well-known and respected than leading figures among other African societies in South Africa such as the amaZulu, amaXhosa and baPedi, and some of their contemporaries in Botswana. Of course there are exceptions. Silas Modiri Molema wrote an excellent account of the life of Montshiwa of the Ratshidi baRolong, surely one of the most outstanding African figures of the nineteenth century.¹ Kevin Shilling-ton published his important doctoral thesis on the colonisation of what he terms the Southern Tswana (mainly the baTlhaping, baTlharo and baRolong) in 1986, putting them on the map. His work culminates with the last act of local resistance, the Langeberg revolt in 1896 and its consequences: land confiscation, human displacement and immiseration. He afterwards wrote another book on the longneglected personality Luka Jantjie, almost certainly the real hero of baTlhaping resistance to colonialism.²

In this volume we draw together previously unpublished material and existing literature, much of it resulting from our own research (but also that of others) to provide a fuller narrative of important aspects of the history of the Setswanaspeakers and a few of its leading figures in the North West Province. A lot of this had been updated or re-interpreted. Only a portion of the scholarly work that has been conducted has been published, and much of it in rather esoteric publications not generally accessible or of interest to a general reading public. Our volume is an attempt to fill the gaps that exist in our understanding of the history of African people in the region, especially in the twentieth century, but this is not to imply that the collection represents the final or complete word on the region’s past. It is intended more to open up a number of perspectives, and a subset of shared experiences, on the history of this particular region of South Africa. We hope to expand our understanding of Setswana-speaking communities in South Africa; to inform and enthuse students of South African history; and to attract a wider readership among those whose pasts we recount.

Setting the scene: The land and its inhabitants.

Geographically, one can broadly divide the North West Province into two subregions. The first is the western bushveld which stretches from the western Magaliesberg to the Marico district. The bushveld is not a neatly bounded region (literally, it describes a form of terrain and vegetation characterised by quite dense woodland and tall grasses) but lies between the southern Kalahari Desert and the land slightly west of the Magaliesberg range. More specifically, within this is the area bounded by the Madikwe/Ngotwane rivers in the west, the Limpopo River in the north and the Odi (Crocodile) river system, comprising the Elands (Kgetleng), Apies (Tshwane) and Pienaars (Moretele) rivers, in the east. The water flow from the Odi river system drains into the Limpopo. Not all these rivers are perennial. Today this region forms the northern part of the North West Province where it borders on the Limpopo Province and the Republic of Botswana. Three mountain ranges punctuate the generally undulating nature of the region: the Dwarsberg (Motlhwane) in the north-west, the crumpled ridges of the Swartruggens in the centre, and the Pilanesberg crater in the south-east. Human habitation, in the past and even at present, becomes more scattered and sparse the further north one proceeds, until the higher plateau of the Waterberg in Limpopo affords a milder and more pleasant environment (see Map 2).

The western bushveld was largely impenetrable for Africans and Europeans alike in the nineteenth century. One intrepid traveller, Adolphe Delegorgue, attempted to cut through the bushveld in the early 1840s. Within a week he had begun to turn back, forced by the ‘haak-doorn (acacia) whose fang-like thorns tore pitilessly at the flesh … like fishhooks’, the ‘death of the last of my oxen … from the sickness which people attribute to flies’, and the insects (specifically ticks and mosquitoes) which tormented him ‘as no others had in Africa’.³ The unfortunate man was furthermore plagued by a tapeworm that forced him to consume a vast amount of meat each day.

Wildlife was still plentiful in the early nineteenth century, supporting early occupants of the region who were adept hunters, and attracting the early attention of gun-using hunters on the western highveld. Most of the animals of the African savannah were to be found here and lions were a common scourge. John Campbell, a missionary of the London Missionary Society (LMS) in 1821, noticed that the African population was forced to build special elevated sleeping structures for their children to protect them from lions,⁴ and the explorer David Livingstone nearly met his end in a lion attack in 1846 in the Gopane area, just north of modern Zeerust. Well-known nineteenth-century big-game hunters such as Gordon Cumming, William Cornwallis Harris and Frederick Courtney Selous found the area to their liking. Visiting the Pilanesberg in 1836, Harris remarked on the sight of ‘three hundred gigantic elephants, browsing in majestic tranquility amidst the wild magnificence of an African landscape, and a wide stretching plain darkened, as far as the eye could see, with a moving phalanx of gnoos and quaggas whose numbers simply baffle computation’.⁵

FIGURE 1: The road to Dinokana c. 1987 – typical bushveld terrain

Source: Joe Alfers

The second subregion comprises the area south of the Molopo River (bordering on Botswana) to the southern reaches of the Harts River before its confluence with the Vaal, and east of the Ghaap plateau: that is, the land between modern Mafikeng down to Vryburg and Taung. This is a drier and ecologically more limited part of the province. Though criss-crossed with a number of westward-flowing river systems, the river beds remain dry for most of the year. With an average rainfall of between 38 and 56 cm agriculture provided only a precarious source of livelihood, particularly in times of drought. In the early to mid-nineteenth century the vegetation comprised mainly intermittent but palatable grasses, bushveld scrub, trees and succulents, usually classified as ‘Kalahari thornveld’. This grassland could sustain cattle and other animals, especially in the Molopo basin where more rain fell and the grasses were sweeter. Fortunately, for the inhabitants and animals alike, limestone outcrops give rise to many springs or fountains (also called ‘eyes’) that provide constant water, and enable boreholes to be sunk, especially close to the river beds. Since the mid-nineteenth century, overcrowding and ecological degradation has caused the region’s flora to deteriorate. In his pioneering book The Road to the North, the historian AJI Agar- Hamilton describes this part of the country as ‘bleak, arid and treeless’, and exposed to ‘a desiccating dry wind’.⁶ However, early nineteenth-century observations by travellers, missionaries and naturalists, most of whom pioneered the hunters’ and missionaries’ ‘Road to the North’, suggest that it was more arable and provided better conditions for human habitation and the fauna of the region than it does today (see Map 3).

Until well into the nineteenth century, this territory accords with what historians have described as an ‘open’ frontier, one where two distinct societies, one indigenous (in this case the Setswana-speakers) and one intrusive, comprising white adventurers and other immigrants (principally the Griqua and Kora), encountered one another and struggled to establish full hegemony over the region. This north-west bushveld frontier opened up as the Transorangia frontier further south closed in the 1840s. The Transorangia region had, from the late eighteenth century, been a ‘mélange of people’: Griqua, Kora, Khoisan, Sotho-Tswana and a handful of white farmers, for the most part seeking stability in a volatile region.⁷ Some of the inhabitants of the north-west frontier, through trade activities and by displacement from the bushveld during the migratory years after the so-called difaqane in the 1820s, had in fact already experienced life in Transorangia.

The north-west frontier closed in two stages, first with the declaration of the Bechuanaland Protectorate in the 1880s (which led to British control and safe passage through to the Ndebele state in Matebeleland), and second with the Boer defeat of Mabhogo during 1894 (which provided the Boers with easier occupation of the Waterberg district) and the rinderpest epidemic (1896) which killed off much of the wildlife hosting the tsetse, thereby facilitating trekker penetration of the Limpopo valley.⁸ As Neil Parsons observes,‘contemporary maps customarily marked the Limpopo as the boundary (of the South African Republic, SAR) and South African historians have accepted this fiction as if before the 1900s the SAR had indeed filled out as far north-west as the Limpopo’.⁹ The failure of the South African Republic accurately to define its borders or even to publish official maps led to numerous disputes between Africans and the trekkers or, as the Transvaal Argus of 1876 put it, ‘perpetual haggling and bandying of words with a dozen (native) chiefs’.

The sense of region is not carried forward into this narrative in any intentional thematic way. However, this is as much a ‘regional’ history as anything else, one in which the people happen to share a common past and are mainly Setswana-speakers. The territory offers a number of unique features and evokes quite specific images in the popular imagination. Most obvious and most current is its association with mining. It is home to what is called the Bushveld Igneous Complex (BIC) which, along with Zimbabwe’s Great Dyke Complex, is in turn home to the largest concentration of the ore-bearing lodes that contain the Platinum Group Metals (PGMs). The metals found in the BIC are distinguished by the fact that they contain more platinum than other areas in the world where the PGMs are mined. But in addition to this the BIC contains the world’s largest reserves of chrome and vanadium, both part of the PGM. At the heart of the BIC is the Merensky Reef whose core runs through the western bushveld. Global demand and improved technological ability led to a steady increase in platinum mining from the early to mid-1980s to the point where 44 million ounces of the metal were refined in 2011. The mining of PGMs constitutes what can be termed the third mineral revolution in South Africa, after diamonds and gold. The earlier revolutions led to the expansion of colonialism and the rise of the capitalist state, at considerable cost to the indigenous population; the platinum revolution coincided with the advent of democracy, with different interest groups able to exert pressure on the state. This has introduced a new set of complexities and contradictions that are still playing themselves out in the second decade of the new millennium.

The consequences of this unbridled explosion of mining in the BIC led to the migration of large numbers of workers into the region, most of them ethnic ‘strangers’ from other parts of South Africa. Low wages and poor living conditions on the mines led to bouts of labour unrest that culminated in the strike at Lonmin’s Marikana plant in the baPo area that led to the tragic events of August and September 2012 when close to fifty people were killed, most of them mineworkers. These events are etched indelibly on the public mind and caused an international outcry and considerable self-reflection in all sectors of South African society. Although this book is not directly about the revolutions (economic, social and environmental) that have accompanied the mining history of the bushveld, it does provide a context and background to some of the significant moments of the region’s past that gave rise to these chaotic conditions. Moreover, labour-related issues are not the only source of socioeconomic discontent and division among the region’s inhabitants. They have also been afflicted by deep-rooted forms of ethnic contestation.

A second image which the bushveld evokes today is that of its well-known game reserves. The two that stand out are the Pilanesberg and Madikwe reserves, but in recent years there has been a proliferation of smaller game farms in the area. Linked to the Pilanesberg reserve is the Sun City resort, a controversial island of opulence in what has been, despite the advent of mining, a very impoverished rural district. The development of these aspects of the tourism industry affected the surrounding communities in several ways – for example, it led to land alienation, and while work opportunities were created they were accompanied by exploitation and social dislocation.

A further outstanding characteristic of the region as a whole is its palaeontology which points to humankind’s evolutionary past. The famous Taung child fossil was discovered in 1924 by Raymond Dart and the rich archaeology of the early baTswana has been excavated and written about by several of southern Africa’s leading archaeologists.¹⁰ Many important sites dot the countryside and provide evidence for its settlement by the forefathers of the African communities who still inhabit it. The sites range from small outposts, probably cattle kraals, to large towns or mega-sites inhabited by up to 20 000 people. The most spectacular were at Kaditshwene, north of modern Zeerust, and at Dithakong, the capitals respectively of the baHurutshe and baTlhaping in the early decades of the nineteenth century, both visited by European observers. More recently, large sites have been discovered at Molokwane and Marathodi, providing evidence of large-scale cattle keeping, extensive trade networks, an understanding of stone wall construction and the centralisation of power and wealth in the hands of a chiefly elite.¹¹

Many of the sites are within a day or two’s walking distance apart, suggesting close political and trading relations between the groups who lived there. Although this volume’s narrative begins well after these developments, the rich archeological evidence illustrates the longevity of the people in the bushveld/thornveld and their expertise as cattle keepers, and fashioners of iron implements and other trade items.

The archaeological evidence pointing to the origins and early settlement of Tswana-Sotho groups is confirmed by quite a rich body of oral traditions (pointing to when people have ruled and when specific events are said to have occurred) which trace the Tswana ruling lineages to as far back as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries AD. The archaeology and the oral records prove conclusively that the pre-colonial baTswana did not live in conditions of tribal primitiveness or isolation and that they were thus capable of responding to, and engaging with, the new forces that swept across the western highveld from the mid to late-1830s.

Lastly, another view of the bushveld in particular is presented through the novels of Herman Charles Bosman written in the 1920s and based on his time in the Marico or Madikwe district. Particularly (but not solely) for generations of white South Africans for whom Bosman was prescribed reading at schools during the last fifty-odd years of the twentieth century, it is represented as a charming backwater of changeless quietude. Certainly, Bosman was too astute an observer not to ironically allude to the prejudices, hypocrisy and contradictions of Afrikaner society in the Marico, but the overriding impression one gains is of a Boer society which first tamed and then laid claim to the region. In fact, it was a much more contested terrain than that, and the African societies of the bushveld exercised more independence than is presented in Bosman’s novels.

The window through which all of these features of the North West Province can to varying degrees be viewed are the predominantly Tswana merafe or chiefdoms: the baHurutshe, the baKgatla ba Kgafela, the baFokeng, the baKwena, the baKubung ba Rantheo and ba Monnakgotla, the baRolong, the baTlhaping and a number of smaller or related offshoots of these communities. Scholars examining African settlement and social organisation in southern Africa have in recent times questioned the usefulness and precision of describing African societies in terms of ‘tribes’ or ethnic groups. The membership of these merafe was not fixed, and they were constantly being reshaped by newcomers or a changing of names. Nor can we simply assert that people a few centuries ago might even have called themselves the baRolong or baHurutshe. Despite this, we have adopted the ‘ethnic formulation’ while recogising its limitations.

TRIBES AND ETHNICITY

Recent reformulations of the nature and meaning of ‘tribes’ among the baTswana (and in South Africa generally) have stressed their fluid, fluctuating and multiethnic character. Ethnicity is viewed therefore as a form of false consciousness, one that was imposed on African society by settler and colonial societies anxious to divide African people into recognisable and delineated ‘tribes’. In 2010, Paul Landau extended this hypothesis by suggesting that there were other equally binding and durable forms of association and mobilisation that characterised African political organisation before their history was recorded and before ‘tribes’ or chiefdoms emerged as the key form of affiliation among Africans.¹ He rejected what he called the ‘fog’ of tribalism and the institution of chieftainship as colonial constructions.

The concept of ‘tribalism’ is open to

Reviews for Land, Chiefs, Mining

[mnicol_11 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A readable, usefully referenced, history of the North West than provides a very useful background to any article of books dealing with the squabbles, splits and internecine strife that characterise communities in the region. This is a feature that extends back into the mists of time. The maps, however, are inadequate. They omit many significant places (Mochudi, Saulspoort...) and the text in Chapter four, in particular, is not understandable without a good map. There are also numerous spelling errors and many inconsistencies in the spelling of names. The book is said to have been 30 years in the making. Two days doing a proper proof read of the text and the maps could surely have been allowed for by the Wits University Press? (Even the scale in incorrect for Map 7). The price for a flawed paperback is unconscionable. But this is an indispensible work for understanding the tangled North West.